Get To Know The Magic Hat

Tucked away behind Laing Gallery on Higham Place, The Magic Hat is one of those enterprises that manages to do something very worthwhile whilst also providing something brilliant for the people of Newcastle.

Growing out of a series of pop-ups and a year at the now-closed Byker Community Centre, The Magic Hat is the public-facing – and very tasty – front end of an organisation seeking to raise awareness of food waste. What this means for you is that for four days a week – Thursday through to Sunday – you can dine out on some high quality, wonderfully prepared food for a budget price while helping fund a series of worthwhile and essential projects.

General manager Joseph Harrop took up his role around a year ago, as the café moved to its current location, and his enthusiasm for the project is highly infectious. He’s very keen to dispel some myths about the café and the food waste issue in general, primarily the idea that the food is all vegan and in some way joyless and worthy.

“What’s really exciting here is sometimes you’ll get a beautiful rib eye steak for £7. We have quite a lot of overheads but they’re based per kilo of food rather than per item, so for us a kilo of fillet steak is the same as a kilo of spuds. On Friday we have a lot of small plates, so you might have dressed crab, that sort of thing, for five or six pounds. We always ensure we have a good selection of vegan or gluten-free courses to make sure it's always accessible but actually, we sell whatever comes through. It’s like Ready! Steady! Cook! – at 7am the chefs start, find out what they’ve got to work with today, put a menu together and serve beautifully cooked, beautifully presented, really tasty food. It makes it really exciting to come down here and see what’s on.”

The food comes from a variety of sources and Magic Hat is part of a network of projects and campaigns working in similar areas. “It fluctuates between about 1.5 and 2.5 tonnes of food a week that we accept, which is a lot. Sometimes it’s a quarter of a tonne of white cabbage, and that’s when you make coleslaw! There’s a company called FareShare which is a national network of regional trusts, we get an awful lot from them. There’s Amazon Foods, Booths is a big one, we get lots of ready meals and stuff from them, dressed crab and langoustine… we’re really well networked with artisan places like Pink Lane Bakery and Northern Rye, we collect from those guys as well as a few supermarkets like M&S and Waitrose.” As well as donations like this, volunteers from the café will get involved in things like ‘gleaning’ – harvesting crops that for various reasons are not profitable for farms and growers to harvest themselves.

Harrop is also keen to point out that The Magic Hat isn’t a zero-waste project. “But we self-audit our waste, create as little as possible. Stuff that we don’t use, we support Action Foundation that works with refugees, Elswick Mutual Aid, Kenton Food Bank. There’s another surplus food place called The Bank in Chopwell, run out of the community centre. So anything we don’t use gets passed on.” After that, Harrop explains, whatever’s left goes to places like Byker Community Farm to feed the pigs, or to students working on bio solutions.

The cafe is changing and improving all the time, both in terms of its projects but also in terms of what it’s offering to customers. There’s a lush new outside area with covered seating in a surprisingly quiet and attractive area, and new ventures all the time. For example, at the weekend the food is Pay As You Feel, because as Harrop explains, “We can showcase the food to as many people as possible, a way to access what we do and put a value on food that has been deemed valueless."

Because The Magic Hat’s ethos is that any permanent jobs shouldn’t be grant funded (it’s a CIC – community interest company – run by the organisation BIND), it needs to earn money in ways that also promote its ideas. So they’re now available for things like weddings and corporate events. “If we cater your wedding, you’re going to get really well fed,” Harrop explains. “We work with the people to find out what their likes and dislikes are, whether the menu should be Mediterranean or North African. So guests get an entirely unique meal, nobody else will ever have exactly the same menu. That unique, shared experience.” And they’re taking on bigger events all the time. “For example, we’re doing The Festival of Thrift on Teesside. Catering a three-course tasting menu, for 100 people, four times in two days! We catered at Pride and Bright Ideas Festival. Stuff like that helps raise awareness of what food waste can be while protecting the accessibility and sustainability of what we do.”

Harrop is equally passionate about the many side projects and campaigns The Magic Hat is involved in, all tied to the issue of food waste. “We need to change perceptions about food waste. Bear in mind, if food waste was a country it would only be behind the US and China in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. We’re into making it a community grassroots movement that’s aspirational and exciting. We don’t want to shame people into change, we want to encourage and energise them. Softly-softly social change.”

Recent or current projects include working with Eat Smart to audit a school’s food waste (last year they saved 1,000 school meals), and a summer holidays project with kids who receive free school meals. “At the moment, we’re actually running Food Newcastle, which is the local authority’s food network. And that ties into a bigger network of stuff: we’re really into cooperative working and transparency around food waste because if we can be honest about our waste we can engage with people about theirs.” All this plus a myriad of volunteer and community projects at the café itself, where a diverse range of volunteers provide different kinds of outreach and community engagement with different communities and even nationalities.

While Harrop is incredibly passionate and well-informed about the issues and projects The Magic Hat is involved in, he keeps coming back to the core idea that The Magic Hat is just a great place to eat and hang out, and that’s obvious from our visit. From the kitchen to the front of house and beyond, everyone is engaged, friendly and diverse, the menus are varied and exciting, the food tasty and keenly priced.

“Feeding people is a lovely thing to get to do.”, Harrop sums up. “For the last 7 or 8 years, I’ve been working in the third sector – not for profits and charities – and getting to feed people or be part of their celebration… It’s just great, a beautiful thing to do.“
 

The Magic Hat Café is open from 10am to 6pm on Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, and from 10am to 9pm on Fridays. For information about what they do, to hire the venue or get something catered, all the details are on their website.